We Speak Music
Monograms Reveals Visually Stunning Music Video for ‘Listen Up’
Monograms is the moniker of Brooklyn-based musical artist, Ian Jacobs. He employs strong, swift tones to convey his creative ideas. Dynamic music with pointillism lyrics, lucid beats, and psychedelic melodies, creates a driving backdrop of underground and popular music across an eclectic spectrum.
His latest offering ‘Listen Up’ is a militant call to action and an epic single from the LP ‘A Fine Commitment’. The track is a barrage of ricocheting beats, angular guitars, and sprawling feedback that builds to a tumultuous crescendo with genre-bending attacks of post-punk, new wave, and indie-rock production, merging dark tones alongside groovy, energetic hopefulness.
An elaborate MUSIC VIDEO accompanies the track as a visually stunning display combining a masked protagonist’s exploits. Monograms fall in and out of his own image, finally landing underwater and into a dream-like performance. This aesthetic enhances the driving, syncopated rhythm, rolling guitars, and distinctive vocals the song offers.
Jacobs reflects: “I knew I wanted to make something fun and elaborate. I started to dig into some big production ideas but built concepts that didn’t take themselves too seriously at the same time. I also wanted to have something about the duality of perspective which is what the song is about, that’s where the idea of the mask came from; The idea that something bad can also be good… and vice versa, depending on how you look at it. Co-Director Brendan Ward and I came up with some crazy ideas and somehow managed to pull them all off.”
‘Listen Up’ which follows previous singles ‘Hi Low’ and ‘Carry The Weight’ finds Monograms expanding his portfolio into exciting uncharted territories. Entirely written and recorded by Monograms in Brooklyn, the song promises a thrilling meltdown of boundaries.
Monograms’ music channels the golden era of college radio whilst retaining the energy of contemporary influences. He accomplishes this while working with sounds from post-punk, gritty pop, and angular psych, to new-wave creating a mesmeric sound.
Since the project’s early bedroom recordings, Monograms has received support from international acts like Cloud Nothings, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Ezra Furman, Sunflower Bean, Man or Astro-Man?, A Place To Bury Strangers, GØGGS (Ty Segall/Ex-Cult), Gilla Band, New Candys, Caveman, DMA’s, Juan Waters, Gang of Youths, Buscabulla, the Wytches, and others.
Reputable media publications including Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, Earmilk, Under the Radar, the 405, Post-Punk, and Alt Citizen, to mention a few, have praised Monograms’ music. These features have resulted in increased exposure on radio, film, and television (KEXP, Shameless on Showtime, and SXSW Film Festival).
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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